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The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a top Game of the Year contender, it’s also a massive commercial success. Studio the development team along with publisher Kepler Interactive announced that the game topped five million copies sold, and that’s despite its status as a launch-day addition on Xbox Game Pass.

Its success came as quite a shock for the team. “I was strongly believing that we would have a good game achieving some average market performance,” a key executive stated.

Another leading developer remarked that Clair Obscur’s critical score, now standing at 93, came as the greatest surprise” to the studio versus what we anticipated and the actual outcome proved to be. When the score released all staff members celebrated excitedly. It felt absolutely wild.”

That success resulted in the studio creating new free content for players including novel settings, adversaries, along with challenging bosses, as announced would be out within the “upcoming month[s]”.

Nevertheless, while the game is growing, it's unlikely they'll hire extensively. “We have an excellent group with a strong creative director possessing strong ideas for our work plus upcoming innovations. We intend to preserve the human scale that made this possible and perhaps create one big game after another,” the executive added.

The studio's scale drummed up plenty of debate upon the title's release. Some developers, like Hideo Kojima, looked at Sandfall’s team as the “ideal” for game development. Despite being relatively lean next to major studios, a quick look at the title's staff list shows that numerous contributors worked on it; the French studio partnered with overseas animators handling movement and effects, to illustrate.

“Some hiring will occur slightly more definitely if we have next an upcoming production peak in the coming years,” the executive said. “But I would see essentially a craft studio of a few highly skilled individuals that create a work of art together.” He noted that Sandfall’s vision as a company “is more to maintain the successful elements that led to this accomplishment from the start.”

Although it's not the right time to say specifically regarding upcoming titles — rest assured, I tried to get them to — the team does know what’s at its core. “The turn-based aspect, is integral to our identity of our creations,” they remarked. “It's still premature to be able to tell future passions, yet we must to adhere to our studio's essence with [a] strong narrative universe and engaging mechanics that excites us.”

The lead programmer added that the project originated from the visionary developing his passion title. And hopefully that philosophy will be repeated as well for future productions.”